Samuel Beckett: riassunto breve

SAMUEL BECKETT RIASSUNTO

Samuel Beckett was the prominent figure of the theatre of Absurd, he was a playwright and a novelist, lived mainly in Paris and wrote both in French and in English. His famous play: Waiting For Godot disrupted the existing conventions of the theatre. Its characteristics consist in a combination of Absurd and illogical situations in a realistic language.

What happens in the play is not arranged in a plot or in a chronological sequence. The characters : two tramps are sad, but they provoke laughter.They spend their time waiting a certain Godot (this name could suggest God) who never arrives as the critic Martin Erslin wrote: the subject of the play is not Godot but waiting, because the act of waiting represents an essential aspect of human condition in fact in our life we always wait for something (Godot is the symbol of our waiting), an event, a person, death…

SAMUEL BECKETT LIFE AND WORKS

It is in the act of waiting that we realize the flow of time (in fact if we are active we tend to forget that time seems never to pass) Becket wrote other plays such as: Endgame, Krapp’s last-tape and Happy days, and some novels: Molloy, Malone Meurt and The Unnameable (which like his plays express a pessimistic vision of life: men have few possibilities to escape their destiny, the life is purposeless and he can only survive waiting for something that never comes). He wrote in French to render his farm neat and essential (without indulging in embellishment or in the use of words for their own sake). He received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1969.